Northern Crow

Along the margin where the asphalt fails
and wild sumac rises,
the crow walks, black-lit and watchful,
a silhouette feathered by histories I barely remember.

His eyes, polished stones, regard
the world with the patience of a thing
that has already lost so much,
that expects nothing but cold wind
and the promise of old bones beneath the leaves.

He knows the taste of November’s first rot,
the hush of frost just before dawn
when the world holds its breath.
He forages among the offerings;
rusted keys, shattered acorns,
fragments of an unsaid prayer
left behind by children or priests.

I remember something Thomas Berry wrote,
about the necessary darkness,
how death, in the webbed roots of things,
becomes soil, becomes future,
becomes the cry of crow at daybreak.

He is not above or below me,
he is kin in the loosest sense,
stranger and prophet,
who gathers what is broken
and makes it part of his living.

Sometimes, when I walk the boundaries of my own heart,
I feel his shadow pass, a brush of wing,
a reminder that nothing is truly wasted,
not even sorrow, not even longing.

Under a sky bruised by the ache of dusk,
he lifts his voice, not as lament,
but as invitation, a way to say;
Even now, the world is not finished.
Even now, something unnamed and winged
waits to be born from what is left behind.